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Preface
FORTY years ago John Muir wrote to a friend: "I
am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.... Civilization and fever, and all
the morbidness that has been hooted at me, have not dimmed my glacial eyes,
and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness."
How gloriously he fulfilled the promise of his early manhood! Fame, all
unbidden, wore a path to his door, but he always remained a modest,
unspoiled mountaineer. Kindred spirits, the greatest of his time, sought him
out, even in his mountain cabin, and felt honored by his friendship. Ralph
Waldo Emerson urged him to visit Concord and rest awhile from the strain of
his solitary studies in the Sierra Nevada. But nothing could dislodge him
from the glacial problems of the high Sierra; with passionate interest he
kept at his task. "The grandeur of these forces and their glorious results,"
he once wrote, "overpower me and inhabit my whole being. Waking or sleeping,
I have no rest. In dreams I read blurred sheets of glacial writing, or
follow lines of cleavage, or struggle with the difficulties of some
extraordinary rock-form."
There is a note of pathos, the echo of an
unfulfilled hope, in the record of his later visit to Concord. "It was
seventeen years after our parting on Wawona ridge that I stood beside his
[Emerson's] grave under a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow. He had
gone to higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in
friendly recognition." And now John Muir has followed his friend of other
days to the "higher Sierras." His earthly remains lie among trees planted by
his own hand. To the pine tree of Sleepy Hollow answers a guardian sequoia
in the sunny Alhambra Valley.
In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first
time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for
they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again
he returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of
the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon this book
of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen departure, John
Muir expended the last months of his. life. It was begun soon after his
return from Africa in 1912. His eager leadership of the ill-fated campaign
to save his beloved Hetch-Hetchy Valley from commercial destruction
seriously interrupted his labors. Illness, also, interposed some checks as
he worked with characteristic care and thoroughness through the great mass
of Alaska notes that had accumulated under his hands for more than thirty
years.
The events recorded in this volume end in the
middle of the trip of 1890. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey
have not been found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded
the volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the
fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a poetical
appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a portrayal of the
auroras — one of those phenomena which elsewhere he described as "the most
glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations of God."
Muir's manuscripts bear on every page impressive
evidence of the pains he took in his literary work, and the lofty standard
he set himself in his scientific studies. The counterfeiting of a fact or of
an experience was a thing unthinkable in connection with John Muir. He was
tireless in pursuing the meaning of a physiographical fact, and his
extraordinary physical endurance usually enabled him to trail it to its last
hiding-place. Often, when telling the tale of his adventures in Alaska, his
eyes would kindle with youthful enthusiasm, and he would live over again the
red-blooded years that yielded him "shapeless harvests of revealed glory."
For a number of months just prior to his death
he had the friendly assistance of Mrs. Marion Randall Parsons. Her
familiarity with the manuscript, and with Mr. Muir's expressed and penciled
intentions of revision and arrangement, made her the logical person to
prepare it in final form for publication. It was a task to which she brought
devotion as well as ability. The labor involved was the greater in order
that the finished work might exhibit the last touches of Muir's master-hand,
and yet contain nothing that did not flow from his pen. All readers of this
book will feel grateful for her labor of love.
I add these prefatory lines to the work of my
departed friend with pensive misgiving, knowing that he would have
deprecated any discharge of musketry over his grave. His daughters, Mrs.
Thomas Rea Hanna and Mrs. Buel Alvin Funk, have honored me with the request
to transmit the manuscript for publication, and later to consider with them
what salvage may be made from among their father's unpublished writings.
They also wish me to express their grateful acknowledgments to Houghton
Mifliin Company, with whom John Muir has always maintained close and
friendly relations.
WILLIAM FREDERIC BADE
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
May, 1916
Contents
PART I. The Trip of 1879
PART II. The Trip of 1880
PART III. The Trip of 1890
Glossary of Words in the Chinook Jargon
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